The Bricks That Built the Houses (32 page)

Harry looks at her knees and gathers her thoughts before looking up at the opposite wall and speaking in a panicked churn of sound, her voice too high in her chest. ‘I don’t want to owe you anything, Pico. I don’t want to be in your debt.’

A silence stalks the table like a hungry wolf. Pico frowns. Carefully pools yellow olive oil and black balsamic vinegar in a small white plate, making a yin-yang which he admires and grinds pepper into. He wipes soft bread across the pool and folds it, dripping, into his neat mouth. He chews, swallows and wipes the corners of his lips.

‘OK,’ he tells her. ‘Now. Here.’ He taps the table with his thumb and forefinger. ‘You have to pay your debts in life, Harry,’ he says sadly. ‘You work for me now, is what I say. I’m looking for a person who can help me, more direct. It’s hard to trust when there’s, you know, this . . . the money like this. It make people lose their centre. This money.’ He sighs deeply.
Harry watches the serrated edge of the knife on her napkin, the uneaten oysters, cold and snotty. ‘You come back, you work for me.’

Her heart is broken and she can’t move and she wishes Becky was here to tell her what to do. Her body begins to shake. Pico can feel it. He is surprised.

‘Your man tried to set me up, Pico,’ she says, her tone a snarl. ‘I trusted you and our arrangements, but that’s what happened.’ Her voice gets louder, the room swims. She speaks towards his ears. ‘That money I took was my recompense, for the danger you put me in. If I hadn’t been prepared to fight, he could have killed me.’ She spits the words out, her body shaking. ‘This money is my life insurance. I don’t want to work for anyone. I want out. I want out of this.’ Her voice is heavy now and thick and beaded with growls. She’s been chain-smoking for weeks and her throat hurts and she’s too scared to drink the posh water. She looks at him with dark ferocious eyes and Pico lets out a good-natured chortle. He leans his head down to rest on Harry’s shoulder. He taps her arm, friendly as a man with his pet. He stays leaning there and the moment is paused in a strained still image. Harry is as awkward as always. Pico is chortling and patting her arm. He sits up, smiling heartily, to lean a pale kiss onto the top of her head and ruffle her hair.

‘A good one,’ he tells her. ‘A good one such as you.’ He giggles a little. ‘People die for less. But you no scared of me that way.’ He breathes deeply and raises his glass to his lips, sips
thoughtfully. ‘So what we gonna do then, Harriety?’ he asks softly. Placing his glass back down on the spotless tablecloth and reaching across her for an oyster.

‘Just let me go, Pico. I’ll give you half the money back. But let this be the end of it. I want to come home. I want to draw a line under all this.’ She blinks slowly. Waits.

‘Home?’ He leans towards her.

‘Yeah.’ She reaches for a glass, pours the cold clear water into her mouth. Holds it at the point of swallowing, lets it soothe her burning throat.

‘You come home, you work for me,’ Pico says, smiling. ‘You stay out here, fine. But you get back to London, you work for me.’

Harry shifts in her chair, massages her jaw. ‘No,’ she says. ‘I don’t want to work for you, Pico.’

Pico’s attitude changes. Something hardens in his eyes, some switch is flicked in his circuitry and he seems to take up twice the space he had a moment earlier.

‘I understand you say it was a set-up and this Joey has been punish, you can trust. He pays the debt for you, he pays.’ Pico cracks the knuckles in his thumbs and little fingers. ‘But you refuse me? When I offer the work? When I say you come work for me? In friendship I offer this, and you say no?’ His voice is quiet and monotonous. Harry is chilled. ‘You think I’m not a serious man?’

Harry waits it out. Knows better than to speak before she absolutely has to. Pico waits too. The wolfish silence comes
again. Hunting. A waiter appears but Pico waves him away with a flick of his hand. The gesture feels so rude to Harry that it makes her stomach ache. Pico sips wine. Eats a forkful of chopped bright leaves. Chews like a farm animal, which seems strange to Harry, given his delicate disposition.

Harry holds on to the table leg. Becky in her brain. Her heart an empty boot since the morning that she left. She has nothing to protect; it makes her stronger than she’s been. Without Becky, what’s the money worth? Without London, what’s the dream? She shrugs. ‘You can do what you like to me, Pico.’ She levels her gaze. ‘I’m finished with this work.’ She stares at the side of his face until her eyes are sore. ‘No more,’ she tells him. Burning up.

Her london has changed.

Becky looks around for all the things that she has missed so much, but nothing is the same. The snooker hall has gone; its foundations are wrapped in construction hoardings and it stands four storeys taller than it used to, rapidly becoming another block of luxury apartments. The half-derelict bridal store and beauty bar where she used to get her nails done and pick up weed – the one that had the mournful mannequin in the window, dressed in the same peacock-blue sequin gown for years – is now a glass-fronted café with exposed brickwork and low-hanging lamps. She wonders what’s happened to Naima, the woman who used to run the shop.
She’d been a friend of Becky’s mum and she knew Becky’s name before Becky did.

The swimming baths have been bulldozed, along with the old town hall where she used to go to playgroup. The old police station. Everything has been or is being turned into flats. The actual flats stand empty and black-eyed. Their windows smashed, their fronts ripped off. Their insides on display. Wallpaper and old sofas and kitchen units shivering in the rain. The area secured. Cameras like crows on the tops of the fencing. She stands and stares up. She feels like stopping someone and shaking them and screaming,
What’s happened here?

Becky watches all the strangers that she passes with increasing panic. Is it just her imagination or are these people really fuller in their faces? Glossier? Healthier? More robust? What’s different? The streets are as busy as ever, but it feels empty.

She steps into Sunshine, holding down panic. They used to come here for breakfast every Saturday when they were hungover and she couldn’t face seeing her auntie and uncle. She feels a hopeless sense of longing for that time and looks around tentatively, glad to see that at least the caff is still the same. Pictures of dogs dressed as aristocrats hang on the brown-tiled walls. Articles from the local paper are faded in their frames. Plastic chairs are nailed to the tables. People eat food from huge plates that are twice the size of plates. The chef has burned some toast and he is standing at the door flapping it open and closed, but the door gets stuck and scrapes on the lino each time it closes so he has to push it
closed and then wrench it back open and the whole thing is proving quite dramatic. She sits at the table by the window and listens to what people are saying, only realising now that for all the long months she’d been away, she’d been unable to listen to strangers speaking. She sinks into it.

‘Here y’are, love, dropped this.’

‘Oh did I? It’s not mine.’

‘Well I don’t want it. I got too much in my bag as it is.’ The waitress takes the pen and walks off.

‘They wrote me a letter, said the rent’s going up at the end of March. I thought, what’s the point?’

‘Oh dear.’

‘This is what I was thinking. I was thinking this is what I’m going to say – I’ll say – it’s ridiculous. They can’t expect—’

‘No.’

‘It’s just ridiculous.’

‘You want a mushroom?’

‘I’m not too keen on them.’

The chef opens and closes the door. His face is pouring with sweat. The girl whose toast is burnt eats her beans with a teaspoon.

‘Well I’ve got the letter here anyway.’

‘He’s even saying that they’re so bad they wanna do the two together. But they don’t know if I’m strong enough.’

‘No?’

‘Over twenty-six years I’ve lived there and I’ve never had anyone talk to me like that.’

‘So I looked at him, right in the eye and I said have you looked at my medical? I’ve got severe colic for one thing.’

‘My Girl’ plays on the radio. Memories of weeping at the cinema, Macaulay Culkin and the bees.

‘He’s a big guy, supposed to be a professor. He’s a professor.’

‘I thought – yeah, but are you in my shoes, mate?’

‘I’ve got two titanium hips, I got nuts and bolts in me.’

She sits into it, like a bath. Drinks her tea. A man in a wide-brimmed hat and a fleece with a logo on the chest that says
Kent Park Equestrian Centre
has a tabloid paper spread flat on the table and his hands are pressed down against it, neatly pushing each crease out to the edge of the page. Reading the sports.

‘What you doing over the holidays? Got anything?’

‘Do you know, I’m dreading it myself.’

Two older women, one in a lime-green hoodie, the other in a brown-and-cream woollen jacket, are talking about the offers in Sainsbury’s.

Becky could weep. Shakespeare’s Sister on the radio. The smell of burnt toast is dying down.

‘Lord Almighty, will you SHUT THAT DOOR.’ A man with one high-soled shoe – medical correction rather than fashion statement – and lank ginger hair, bald at the top, small ponytail out the back, reads a council pamphlet about tax. His daughter is beautiful and has a red patent Alice band pushing her hair back, a pile of burnt toast beside her on the table top. The chef, a Turkish man with a beleaguered look, is being
shouted at by everyone. He brings the girl with the Alice band a new plate of toast. She thanks him. Becky realises it’s not the high-shoe man’s daughter at all. She’s got to be twenty at least. He’s touching her legs. She looks just like the Ukrainian girl that used to massage with Becky a few years ago. Stunning in a troubling way. A packet of fruit pastilles sits open beside her fry-up, she eats a mouthful of beans and then a fruit pastille. The man she eats with reads the pamphlet. She smiles at him. She asks the waitress for a box, for the toast. She puts the burnt pieces away for later.

Becky watches the passing people and she could swear she sees herself, younger, arm in arm with Gloria and Charlotte, walking past, smoking fags, but it isn’t them. It’s some other teenagers, with too much confidence, singing along to X-rated American pop-rap blaring out their mobile phone speakers.

Becky finishes her tea, pays and smiles deeply at the woman. She feels her heart skip to be called ‘babes’ like that.

Becky approaches the Hanging Basket and stands outside it. She leans against the railings, smokes a cigarette and doesn’t look at anyone that walks past. Last time she was here was the night she left.

It’s three in the afternoon and there’s a gathering of good drinkers singing Van Morrison on the benches out the front. One guy has a guitar and he’s standing, strumming it, throwing his head back, one foot on the bench. The others sing with him, smiling. Shot through with life and pain, and lonely, lonely
days, they hold hearts and glasses and sing their battered souls out. Their haggard faces are deeply lined. Becky glances at the shaven-headed woman, the pretty teenage boy, the square-faced strong-man, hard as nails, the peaceful quiet drunk whose grey dreadlocks brush his ankles, the pot bellies, skinny shoulders, bright eyes, closed eyes, red eyes, missing teeth, gold teeth, crooked teeth, the sharp suits and old clothes and battered shoes she’s always known. The pretty young drunks with their dogs and their hoods, tattoos and piercings, heavy old boots, sexy as new love, looking like an advert for a life you never had the guts to live. The curly-haired women with the swear words and the sharp tongues. Their hands on their hips, cleavage and perfume, and their lives stretch into the distance like railway tracks behind them. Always laughing. They blow kisses Becky’s way; she returns the gesture. Holds their arms at the elbows as she passes. They swing their bodies to the song. Today they will drink to the point of delirium, cheerful and drug-racked. This place is the jewel in south London’s shackles.

She pushes through the doors. Her bag gets caught on the handle and she has to twist awkwardly to free it. The doors hit her legs as they swing back. She steps inside, tucking her hair behind her ears. She pulls at her clothes, aware of herself, touches her hair again. Nothing’s changed but the flyers on the wall. She stares around wondering how it’s supposed to feel. And then, there she is.

Gloria is talking to a woman in her fifties who is leaning backwards against the bar. The woman shakes her head,
throws her hands up. Gloria laughs and goes to pour the woman another glass of wine. As she does she sees Becky and almost drops the bottle, but she has been a barmaid too long for that.

‘Hi,’ Becky says, waving like a tourist posing for a picture.

‘You idiot. Just standing there,’ Gloria says, taking the money for the wine and coming out from behind the bar to embrace her.

‘Oh my God,’ Becky moans, collapsing into her arms.

‘Becky Becky Becky Becky.’ They hold each other at arm’s length and look at each other, then hug each other again. Becky’s face is pressed against Gloria’s hairclip or something and it hurts but it doesn’t matter because they need to hug like this. But it does hurt. Gloria squeezes her tighter and tighter saying, ‘Oh my God oh my God oh my God,’ and Becky doesn’t know what to do with her hands. She holds them together in front of her belly while Gloria takes a step back.

‘Let me have a look at you then,’ she says. ‘Where’ve you fucking been for one thing?’

Becky shakes her head. ‘Not yet, G. Just give me a minute, yet, is that OK?’ Becky holds a hand to her head, Gloria wraps an arm around her shoulder and squeezes her close, kissing her head before moving back behind her bar.

Becky stands in front of the bar, Gloria stands behind it. They look at each other. Becky feels nervous suddenly, silly.

‘What you having then?’ Gloria asks her.

‘Dunno. Are we drinking?’

‘Probably should be, shouldn’t we?’

‘Vodka, lime and soda then,’ Becky says, tapping on the bar with her fingers while Gloria turns to fix the drinks. There’s a rail that runs round the bar a couple of inches off the floor. Becky stands with one foot on it, leaning her elbows on the bar, looking around. The cars go past outside, the TV is on and Gloria puts the drink down in front of Becky, standing opposite her with her arms crossed. One hand on her earlobe, spinning her hoop around.